


RED DEAD REDEMPTION, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love outlaws

by leupagus



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Essays, Fandom Primer, Meta, Spoilers, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 11:20:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16596899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/pseuds/leupagus
Summary: Non-fiction primer, intended to con some of you suckers into caring about Grand Theft Horsie along with me so I don't have to cry by myself anymore.





	RED DEAD REDEMPTION, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love outlaws

So you may have noticed me shrieking about Grand Theft Horsie on [tumblr](http://leupagus.tumblr.com/tagged/grand-theft-horsie) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/leupagus) for the past week or so, which would rightly make you think “has Gus just… lost it?” because while I love a great number of video games (Dragon Age, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Dragon Age II, Heavenly Sword, Dragon Age Inquisition) I am not usually that fannish about them—that is, I enjoy them on my own and don’t feel the need to share with others particular moments while yanking on their arms and saying “DID YOU SEE THAT DID YOU OH MY GOD I WANT TO DIE.” Not to mention that most video games are incredibly hard to _be_ fannish about; it requires either actually playing the game (which is a significant monetary expense) or finding a good letsplay/synopsis of the game (still a pretty intense time expense), which makes it something of a niche market fandom-wise.

But lord help me I have fallen horrifically in love with red dead redemption 2 and its merry band of nutsos, and if there’s even the remotest chance in hell that I can get like… five people to come into this foxhole with me, I will consider myself hashtag blessed.

Below is my attempt to explain these games to you, taken mostly from my attempt to explain these games to the ever-patient @sadcypress, who made the huge error of saying “I’m vaguely interested in this” and will regret that for the rest of her life probably. I’m going to try to outline what the games are, the stories they tell, and why I love them, so obviously these will contain spoilers for the actual games. I could try to make a spoiler-free version of this but I’m afraid it would just boil down to “IT MADE ME CRY SO MUCH!!”

Anyway. Saddle up.

 **Background:** Rockstar Games, which is known for their incredibly shitty but weirdly popular Grand Theft Auto games, released a game way back in 2004 called Red Dead Revolver, about VENGEANCE IN THE OLD WEST etc. It was moderately successful, I think, about a guy named Red whose family is dead and goes on a rampage to get back his dad's revolver, hence the name, whatever, it’s a thing that happened. I have deffo not played it but I have seen a few clips of it and it is Extremely Two Thousand And Four.

Cut to 2010. Rockstar is still making shitty but popular GTA games and then comes out of fuckin' left field with Red Dead Redemption, which is a terrible title and actually has nothing to do with the first game other than sharing a name and like, “vague approximation of Old West" setting.

 **Sidenote** : my feelings about Red Dead Redemption (hereafter called Red 1) are heavily influenced by the fact that I played it shortly after my mother died; it served as an emotional crutch for me at a time when I desperately needed one, trapped in a house with an undemonstrative father and friends who were too far away to lend much support. I’m not kidding when I say that the game kept me from going bananas with grief, and for that I will always have extremely rose-colored glasses about it. So if you’ve played it and think “Gus is making this sound WAY BETTER than it is,” you are probably right.

 **Is there an actual plot to this game? Sort of!** So Red 1 is about a guy named John Marston, a gang-affiliated-gunslinger-turned-family-man-and-rancher, who is making an honest life for himself and his wife Abigail and son Jack out in West Elizabeth, which is like… Oklahoma? Kind of? (In keeping with GTA tradition, the names of all towns and states and people are made-up, even when they’re clearly modeled off of real-world places. America and Mexico are real, but the rest of the geography is fictional.) We start the game with events already in motion—John’s being blackmailed by an evil government stooge into rounding up or killing of members of his old gang, including the gang leader. Basically, fetch quests, Old West style.

Off he goes to collect the first guy, Bill Williamson (yes his name was William Williamson and yes I do believe that’s why he turned to a life of crime), and of course everything goes to shit immediately—John ends up shot and left for dead (which we will find is a theme in John’s life). He is rescued by a kindly rancher named Bonnie MacFarlane who

  1. a) becomes enormously fond of John almost immediately and
  2. b) expresses her fondness by roasting him at every available opportunity.
  3. c) she’s GREAT



Long story short, John has all sorts of adventures catching both Bill and Javier Escuela (another former cohort) after Bill flees to Mexico to get help from Javier. John goes after them and sort of accidentally helps to overthrow Mexico, like you do, but he catches Javier and kills Bill (or, depending on gameplay, witnesses his death). It’s pretty straightforward, although you meet an array of characters along the way, from the well-drawn to the frankly racist caricature (this is still Rockstar and they’re still pretty shitty), and you also find out more about John’s backstory as you play.

 **The Backstory:** John and Bill and Javier all once followed a man named Dutch Van Der Linde (yes the dumb names are legion), an incredibly charismatic and brilliant outlaw who styled himself as a Robin Hood-esque figure. Dutch found John at a young age and was a father figure to him—taught him to read, to shoot, to believe in a certain code of honor. But at some point about 12 years prior, Dutch started to lose his grip; he became paranoid with delusions of grandeur. Despite this, and despite already having started a family with Abigail, John was still in it for the long haul—until some heist went wrong and John was left for dead. After that, he became disillusioned with Dutch and his “ideals,” and left the gang. Shortly after that, it seems, the gang itself disintegrated, with Javier and Bill and unknown other gang members all going their own way. John and Abigail and Jack managed to get a farm and settled down, along with Uncle (who isn’t actually anyone’s Uncle but another gang member who mostly complains about his lumbago and who John is constantly threatening to throw out but never actually does it).

 **Is there more plot? Yes, sadly:** So after taking out Bill and Javier, John has to go and kill Dutch for the evil government stooge who’s holding his family hostage (because what would a AAA game be without a woman imperiled). And this is where the game gets… not good, exactly, but unusual. Because in most video games, the Big Boss is, well—big. You usually have to do a lot of advanced shit in order to get to him, and even more advanced shit in order to kill him. But Dutch’s questline isn’t all that difficult (at least from what I remember; granted it’s been 8 years since I played) and in the end, John confronts him out on a cliff-face and sees… an old man in his union suit, a bit pathetic:

 

Then finally, John can go home.

This is where, in a typical open-world game (although I’m not sure how many “open-world” games there actually were in 2010), the player is released into the world itself and can just fuck around finishing challenges or completing side missions. But instead, the game turns into Farm Simulator—you do missions like teaching Jack how to shoot or delivering grain to your friend Bonnie (and btw if you were worried that Bonnie and Abigail would somehow have some sort of rivalry, don’t you worry:

I’m just saying, where’s my AU of Bonnie and John and Abigail all living together happily ever after).

But then of course things go wrong, because it wouldn’t be a western if there wasn’t something deeply fucked up about the ending (looking at you, OLD YELLER, which I watched when I was EIGHT YEARS OLD AND TRAUMATIZED FOR LIFE). The evil government stooge comes back with a whole posse of men—because Dutch was absolutely right about having to find another monster. And John, having killed or captured all of the last remaining outlaws, is himself the only one still standing.

In the resultant shootout, Uncle is killed and John makes sure Abigail and Jack escape—“don’t look back,” he orders them, and watches them gallop off. He then steps out of the barn and confronts the evil government stooge—only to be gunned down by dozens of men, dying on his feet but still horribly.

And even then, the game isn’t over—instead the player character is now Jack (and yes I very much wish that you could play as Abigail instead but oh well). We cut to a few years later: Abigail has recently died, and so Jack has buried her next to John on a hilltop overlooking the farm. He then goes off in search of—you guessed it!—revenge, on the evil government stooge who killed his father. He finds the stooge retired, fishing near his cabin, and the resultant duel (and death of the stooge) is the actual end of the game. You’re released into the open world—albeit with a price on your head.

I have no idea how this ending was received by anyone else, but I personally loved it; whether intentionally or not, the ending is incredibly flat and unsatisfying, a pointless final mission that didn’t solve anything and only ends up making Jack a wanted man, possibly forever trapped in the same life that killed his family. His dreams of being a writer are set aside for vengeance, and it comes at a terrible cost.

Now before anyone goes and tries playing the game or finding a decent playthrough, I should caveat that this is a game with SERIOUS FUCKING FLAWS, some of them possibly dealbreakers. Violence against women is rampant—the player can choose to shoot, hogtie, kidnap women and do grisly things like leave them on train tracks and watch them get run over. In fact, Rockstar has an “achievement” for exactly that! Prostitutes are ubiquitous and their peril is played as a game mechanic—they’re regularly assaulted or even murdered by various men, allowing John to either kill the assaulter or deliver him to the sheriff, but still resulting in a lot of dead women. There’s also some astounding racism in the game—the entire section that takes place in Mexico is something out of a bad spaghetti western, with “evil Mexicans” on both sides and John, the white guy savior, contemptuous of almost all of them. In fact the game falls victim to the same core problem that most Rockstar games have: no one except the player is “real,” everyone else is equally dismissable and unimportant. (Rockstar went even further into this depressing perspective with GTA V released in 2013, in which none of the three main characters were remotely likeable or even very recognizably human, just a collection of hateful stereotypes and nihilism).

But there are moments that are just profoundly beautiful, like the long ride John takes into Mexico. It’s haunting and quiet and very, very unusual for a video game like this one.

Like I said, a lot of my feelings about this game are tied to the circumstances in which I played it, but I still have a soft spot for it while admitting that it’s not all that _good_. But I was still stoked when I heard that they were coming out with Red Dead Redemption 2:

(LOL “ Fall 2017” whoops missed that deadline by a bit. Also uh-oh, the “don’t look back” line makes a return, but I’m sure it can’t mean anything bad will happen right?)

 **What’s it all about?** So despite its name, Red 2 is actually a _prequel_ : set in 1899, 12 years before the events of Red 1, it deals with—of course—the mysterious events described by the first game, about what exactly happened to Dutch’s gang and why John and Abigail left.

But you don’t play as John. Instead you play as Arthur Morgan, Dutch’s right-hand man and chief enforcer, a loyal gang member for twenty-odd years and committed to following Dutch through whatever hell he puts them through. He’s quickly established as a sarcastic, reliable but not at all good man, who has zero compunctions about doing the gang’s dirtiest work:

So pretty much right away, the “protagonist” in this game is shown as very, _very_ different from John, who was the quintessential “good man in a bad situation.” Arthur, by contrast, is a bad man in a very bad situation—though Dutch styles himself and his gang as a latter-day Robin Hood, robbing only the wealthy and powerful and giving to the poor and needy; an often-repeated phrase of Dutch’s is “We shoot people as need shooting, save them as need saving, and feed them as need feeding.” Arthur clearly believes this even if he knows it’s not as rosy as Dutch makes it out to be; part of the reason he’s so willing to be the bad guy is because he thinks they do, on the whole, do good.

And he certainly has his moments:

In fact it’s his relationships with other people in the gang, like Sean and Lenny, that define Arthur’s character. I’m sure a lot of people will find him unsympathetic throughout the game, but to me, it was watching him interact with his friends (and enemies) that made me love him. Not to mention, even when protecting baby Jack from more evil government stooges (actually Pinkertons but same diff), he’s still a sarcastic little shit:

He’s also a diarist, which is a clever bit of nonsense—you get to read his journal and get a better idea of his real feelings, as well as the various drawings and doodles he makes:

**OK but what about the other people in the game?** I’m going to put together a list of all the characters in Red 2 at some other time, because they’re all AMAZING, much better written and interesting and real than anyone from Red 1. From the adorable photographer Albert Mason to the venerable conman Hosea Matthews, I adore almost everyone in this game—including Bill Williamson and Javier Escuela, who are more thoughtfully drawn in this game and extremely likeable, especially Javier. (Bonus points go to this moment at the very beginning of the game:

That’s some ice cold foreshadowing bro. Also if you watch the whole clip, it gives a pretty hilarious overview of Arthur’s irritation with John’s very existence.)

But the new characters are just as great, even if most of them are never heard from in the first game/sequel. Special mention has to go to Charles Smith, a quiet and thoughtful hunter who sees through Arthur’s bluster to the kinda-sorta good man he is beneath and whose own character arc is a thing of beauty; and Sadie Adler, a widow found in the first scene by Dutch and Arthur, whose husband was murdered by a rival gang and who joins up with Dutch out of a lack of any other options at first, but who gradually turns into the biggest badass of the entire game. Both of them could have been caricatures of the Wise Brown Man or the Angry Vengeful Harpy, but instead are these lovely (and sometimes terrifying) people that Arthur grows to love as much as he does John and Abigail.

 **Speaking of John and Abigail:** For two of the best-developed characters in the first game, they’re even more engaging here—mostly because Arthur doesn’t like John much, despite being one of the people who semi-raised John from childhood. And in keeping with the first game, the reason for this acrimony comes out over time; it turns out that John, far from being the family man he seemed to be, got Abigail pregnant with Jack and then _left_ them, and the gang, for about a year, only coming back recently; while everyone else has forgiven John, Arthur’s still angry about it, for a lot of complicated reasons (though thankfully not out of rivalry for Abigail’s affections). One of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me is knowing how John turns out in Red 1 and getting to see him 12 years earlier here, as a snot-nosed kid who looks up to Arthur and Dutch but can’t ever seem to shake their shadows loose.

 **Speaking of Dutch:** In the first game, Dutch was not just the big bad but one of the central villains of the game, someone John couldn’t trust and had to put down. Here, he’s at his absolute best, leading the gang with his best friend Hosea and his surrogate sons John and Arthur and an entire crew that’s loyal to him. It’s immediately clear from the first scene why people are so willing to fight and kill and die for him—he’s not just a skilled orator and master grifter but truly invested in the welfare of his people. Seeing him like that makes the first game hit all the harder—especially with parallels like this:

**OK but is there a PLOT:** Not… really? This is a very weird game in that it feels more like a TV season than a video game; there’s lots of mini-arcs throughout but there’s not a clear sense of “find these three bad guys and get back to your family” that there was in the first game. I’m not even sure I could explain the plots very well—there’s about 14 of them—and anyway they’re secondary to the characters’ individual arcs, with Arthur’s of course being the most prominent but with Dutch’s slow but inexorable descent into megalomania and self-delusion as a constant sour note. In fact the main plot is probably just Arthur watching his mentor/father figure become something he doesn’t recognize while realizing that perhaps he’s been like this the whole time, and Arthur’s always been following a madman but was too blind to see it.

But while there might not be a traditional plot, this is still a western, which means there is a traditional tragedy—which you knew had to be coming, considering Arthur isn’t one of the men John has to hunt down in the first game. So he has to die, right? Probably the same way John does, in a big shootout?

Well. Remember that poor old sick farmer Arthur beat up and demanded money from? Then went back and demanded the money from his widow? Turns out he got more than the money:

So the final chapter of the game is played with a death sentence hanging over Arthur’s head, with all the existential questions that that involves. What do you do if you’ve spent your life badly, only to find out that your life is coming to an end? Arthur wrestles with this inner turmoil as much as he wrestles with the disintegrating dynamics of the gang.

Arthur becomes invested in getting the “good people” out of the gang before things implode completely, especially John, Abigail and Jack; he puts almost all of his remaining energy—and identity—in trying to save them and getting them out of the outlaw life. (Yes, if you’re wondering, this _is_ devastating in light of what happens in Red 1!)

Of course, it all goes wrong. During the last big heist which is, of course, a train robbery, John is shot and falls off the train; Dutch abandons him to save himself, then when the Pinkertons kidnap Abigail, refuses to save her at the urging of a particularly odious member of the gang, Micah:

The rest of the clip is Abigail’s rescue, which is totally badass but not necessary to watch—mostly I just find it telling that Arthur’s breaking point is Dutch’s abandonment of Abigail, just after the loss of John.

After safely getting Abigail and Sadie away, Arthur once more heads back to Dutch—it’s not quite clear why, but the ambiguity itself is interesting. Why go back, when there’s nothing really to go back to?

Still, he does, to expose Micah for what he really is—a rat out for himself, hoping to winnow down Dutch’s gang with the help of the Pinkertons for his own advancement. The final confrontation pits Arthur, John (who’s returned, spitting mad at being left to die), and the formidable Miss Grimshaw against Dutch, Micah, Bill and Javier. Micah kills Miss Grimshaw just before the Pinkertons show up, requiring everyone to run for their lives. In the ensuing chaos, things go from “really bad” to “truly hideously awful” the way only a game in which you’re encouraged to spend lots of time and energy on your horse can provide:

And it all culminates in the two men fleeing for their lives up a mountaintop, only for Arthur to realize: they can’t both get off the mountain:

Then of course Micah shows back up, beating Arthur to death and overjoyed to watch him die, but of course Arthur is still the better man, even now:

But because it’s Red Dead Redemption, that’s not the end of the game—because of course, of _course_ , what happens is that you now start playing… as John. It’s eight years later and he, Abigail and Jack have been moving place to place, constantly on the run because John’s still shit at a) keeping his temper and b) refraining from shooting people.

What follows is easily the most… I wouldn’t say the most enjoyable part of the game, since I loved Arthur dearly, but the epilogue is definitely more hilariously _fun_ , because what you get is John Marston, Extremely Shitty Ranch Hand Simulator. Missions like “milk cows” and “build fences” pop up, with no gunplay available; instead it’s a family dramedy, with Abigail and Jack both increasingly fed up with John’s tendency to shoot first and ask questions never. Eventually they leave him, too heartbroken over his inability to give up his rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ high-faloutin’... which is, of course, what prompts John to realize “oh shit I love my kid and I’m super in love with my common-law wife, I FUCKED UP WHAT DO I DO.”

What he does is buys a fucking ranch because Abigail mentioned it once. And yes, there are ENTIRE MISSIONS where you have to interact with the banker who gives you a loan. It’s AMAZING. Along the way he finds (or is found by) Uncle and Charles Smith, and together the three of them—I can’t even adequately describe:

Please remember that you are still playing a AAA shooter game that’s supposed to be mega gritty and grim.

(Also for Willie Nelson fans, he literally WROTE AND SANG A SONG FOR THIS GAME:

What even.)

(Actually before I forget there’s ANOTHER music video section of the game that happens earlier, during a long ride Arthur takes back to camp—it’s a song by, I’m not shitting you, D’ANGELO, and it gives me chills every time I listen:

THIS GAME IS BONKERS)

So while John is crossing all his fingers and toes that Abigail comes back to him, Sadie Adler pops up again—now a full-time bounty hunter with plenty of work for John, who is now up to his eyeballs in mortgage and not-so-secretly wanting to let off some steam by killing people. (BTW if you were wondering if you kill a lot of people in this game, you kill SO MANY PEOPLE in this game.) She also eventually finds Micah, and so John and Charles and her all go off for a nice spot of murder.

The final encounter wouldn’t be complete, of course, without the reappearance of Dutch, now older and clearly further gone, and who ends up shooting Micah himself. He then walks off into the snow, leaving behind the money that Arthur and the gang had spent the entire game making—meaning that John is out of debt, Sadie and Charles can do whatever they’d like, and they’re all able to live the dream of a peaceful life, the one Dutch had been promising them all those years ago.

So the game ends with John and Abigail, standing on a hillside looking over their home, talking about their future. It seems like a bright one, and the ending is truly lovely...until you realize that where they’re standing is where they’ll be buried in less than five years.

AND THAT’S RED DEAD REDEMPTION, thank you for coming to my Red Talk. Please comment with any questions you might have, or anything I can help with; I really, really need more people to get invested in this shit, so whatever I can do, lemme know. Below are links to some decent cutscene compilations that give you a good idea of the overall story; if I find anything better, or do a twitch stream myself, I’ll put the link to that here too:

[ https://youtu.be/DgFcnJkS3Xg?t=62 ](https://youtu.be/DgFcnJkS3Xg?t=62)

[ https://youtu.be/fSDSXwKSAyA?t=1 ](https://youtu.be/fSDSXwKSAyA?t=1)

[ https://youtu.be/0i0HfWoeGG0 ](https://youtu.be/0i0HfWoeGG0)


End file.
